John A. Pieper, Pharm.D., FCCP, became the fourth president of St. Louis College of Pharmacy over five years ago. Since that time, his progressive and innovative leadership is moving the school deeper into pharmacological research, as well as local and global partnerships to meet the fast-changing demands of patient care. Pieper spoke with The American about the school’s evolution, directed by the needs of its students and our community.
The St. Louis American: What are some new developments at the college?
John A. Pieper: You are sitting in our new 213,000-square-foot, $56 million building, which we occupied last August. This building houses our School of Pharmacy. We have two schools at St. Louis College of Pharmacy; we have a School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Pharmacy. This is the home of our School of Pharmacy, with approximately 1,000 students, and we have about 500 students in our School of Arts and Sciences. We have 92 classrooms in here, a 400-seat auditorium, two 250-seat classrooms. It really is a state-of-the-art pharmacy building.
We are also in the process of greatly expanding our research initiatives, both to expand new knowledge of the clinical use of drugs at the Center for Clinical Pharmacology, and also to provide research opportunities for students. And, hopefully, our students from Harris-Stowe will be interested in doing research.
The American: Tell us about your partnership with Harris-Stowe State University that you put together with their President, Dwaun J. Warmack.
Pieper: When Dwaun got here in the summer of 2014, we met very early on in his time here, within his first several weeks. I shared with him my vision and he shared with me his vision, and our visions met to develop a partnership with Harris-Stowe, which I had wanted to do when I got here five and a half years ago. Now, the missions and visions were aligned for us to do that.
They are very close to us geographically; it’s three or four miles from here. I was shocked when I got here that we didn’t have a very close relationship – and multiple levels and layers of relationships. And we really didn’t. He and I committed, right when he got here, that we were going to look towards a plan where we could develop a joint degree articulation agreement for pharmacy at Harris-Stowe.
Because I have always valued the quality of their students and the fact that they are a fantastically talented group and can bring a richness to our campus that we haven’t traditionally focused on. And it felt like it was the right thing to do. So once we began to understand there was enthusiasm for this at Harris-Stowe, next came the hard work of looking at the curriculum, with two curriculum committees and two sets of faculty.
At Harris-Stowe, they had to create some classes and create a new major. They had a lot of hard work to do. And, on our side, we are in the midst of a curricular redesign right now as well. And so, it was trying to manage our own internal curricular redesign and redevelopment, at the same time as working with their curriculum and understanding how we would make this work.
As a sophomore, Harris-Stowe pharmacy students will spend a little time on our campus and we’ll spend some time on their campus. In the third year, again they’ll spend some time here and we’ll spend some time there. The fourth year, they’ll come on our campus fulltime, but they will be fulltime Harris-Stowe students. They will be what we call a P1 student, a first-year pharmacy student. At the end of that, they will get a bachelor’s degree from Harris-Stowe and then they will have three more years here to get our doctorate of pharmacy degree.
The American: What other collaborations do you have?
Pieper: Geographically, we are located between Wash. U School of Medicine and Goldfarb School of Nursing. We’re at the interface – using a chemistry term, we are the “surfactant” – between the nurses and the physicians. Metaphorically we are, but clinically sometimes too, pharmacists sort of bridge that gap.
So this was the logical spot for us, in our new building, to house the Center for Interprofessional Education, which combines Wash. U School of Medicine, OT (occupational therapy], PT (physical therapy), audiology and deaf sciences; Goldfarb School of Nursing; and St. Louis College of Pharmacy. The object is for our students to learn together in teams, so that when they graduate and go out into communities and hospitals, they understand what team-based care looks like, how to collaborate with one another, how to take care of patients together. I think there is a national imperative that better patient care happens when there is a team of people with different expertise that work together to care for a patient.
The American: Isn’t that happening in pharmacy schools now?
Pieper: Well, it is happening, and it’s a part of the accreditation standards for all these programs now. Students are expected to have this kind of interprofessional learning opportunity. But it has to be operationalized, and it’s never really been operationalized before.
Also, our students both have a calling to serve the community here in St. Louis, and they also have this yearning to go internationally and get an international cultural experience. So we’ve really heavily invested in an Office for International Programs.
We have partnered with a number of pharmacy schools – from South Africa, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Mexico, Dublin, Ireland, China – where we are sending our students into clinical environments. In fact, I think we have 30 international sites that students can do some clinical experiences around the globe.
At the same time, we are really committed to working with Federally Qualified Health Centers here in St. Louis and to work through that system to get our students exposed to caring for patients who need help, and making sure that we are having our students in those kinds of environments. It’s really this interesting kind of dual commitment to the local area and a commitment globally.
And what’s interesting is the things that students learn globally can be applied here, and the things they learn here they can apply globally. Because in both of these locations are people who have had limited access to healthcare, limited information about how to take care of themselves, limited information and access to services and pharmaceutical products. So, there’s a really nice interface between these international and local experiences and how they work together to expand our students.
